Overnight, we made our way south to the Beagle Channel, a more southerly route through Tierra del Fuego than the Magellan Strait, and one first charted by Captain FitzRoy of HMS Beagle in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Most of our overnight transit involved a long sail around the Cordillera Darwin, named, of course, after Captain FitzRoy’s famous companion-cum-naturalist on board that celbrated vessel.
A gentle early morning wake-up call from our expedition leader alerted us to a spectacular morning in Garibaldi fjord with snow-capped mountains and a retreating blue-ice glacier calving steadily ahead of us. Zodiac cruises were announced and a morning’s exploration commenced with much of interest to see, including a fledgling condor on the lower slopes of the fjord whom we quickly befriended.
In the afternoon we repositioned some 50 miles eastward to visit Yendegaia National Park, a private-public collaboration between the Chilean government and a private foundation run by Douglas and Kris Tompkins that seeks to conserve some 95,000 acres of a former estancia as a wildlife preserve. Yendegaia, in the Yamana language, means “Big Bay” and our afternoon hike in perfect early spring weather conditions afforded numerous opportunities for wide vistas within the fjord. Our destination along a wooded coastal trail was an archaeological site, a seasonal encampment of the Yamana people, with hut circles and associated midden mounds, the latter comprising huge quantities of blue mussels. The settlement was perfectly situated, with two broad and shallow bays, perfect harbors for canoes (another name for the Yamana is the “Canoe Indians”) and a promontory with wide views of the surrounding area both on land and at sea. In the bay we saw Patagonian crested ducks and kelp geese and, as we returned, an exceptionally good sighting of a short-eared owl that may have been flushed out into the open from its more usual habitat by a swarm of small birds seeking to identify a potential predator.
During evening Recap we sailed past the Argentine town of Ushuaia, founded by the Anglican missionary Thomas Bridges, our ultimate destination, en route for Cape Horn.
